The Real Blogger Status

Many people who publish blogs also have FaceBook pages - and one of the easiest ways to get traffic, to the blog, is to share the blog to a FaceBook page. Some people want money for publishing their blogs. AdSense is a very popular way to earn from publishing. AdSense produces the best results, with lots of readers to read the blog, click on the ads, and buy the products and services advertised. FaceBook, and similar social network sharing services, is not the best choice for advertising a blog that uses AdSense ads.

Making a blog searchable is the first step in getting search traffic, and readers, for our blogs - when we want them visible to the public. Not all blog owners want their blogs visible to everybody. Complementing the ability to publish a blog, and have it visible only to invited readers, Blogger gives us the ability to make the blog invisible, to the search engines. If we want readers for a blog, and do not have a private reader audience in mind, we first make it visible to the search engines.

Some blog owners do not understand why ads do not display, on their blogs. We see a frequent complaint, in AdSense Help Forum: Blogger, YouTube, Partner sites . I installed ads to my blog - but the ads are not showing. It has been several months already - and I have received no feedback, from AdSense. Too frequently, the blogs in question turn out to be computer / tech blogs - many offering free downloads of various commercial products.

One sign of confusion, in AdSense Help Forum: Blogger / Host Partners , involves new blog publishers, who want to immediately add ads, after starting their blogs - and need reassurance, about how soon they will be seeing income. What is the actual qualification level, for AdSense? This is a question, from somebody who probably does not understand the AdSense approval process . If AdSense is run properly, final approval is not based on any fixed minimum. There are too many different blog / website subjects, and advertising targets, to have a consistent minimum across all product lines.

We've been exploring bogus redirection of reader traffic , for a few years. Similar to dubious awards and web rings , we have "traffic exchanges". Traffic exchanges are similar to "affiliate marketing", where readers of one blog are randomly shuffled to another blog , then to another - all the while, lighting up ads on each blog.

Too many blog owners have been listening to spammers, who tell them lies, and encourage dodgy publishing practice . You can make lots of money - just start a blog, scrape content from other blogs and websites, and add ads! This is wrong, for many reasons.

I've been studying spam, in Blogger blogs, for over 5 years . This year, we've seen improvement in the automated spam classification process, implied by a noticeable reduction in spam review requests overall - and in a reduction of false positive classifications . During the past few months, blogs requested for review are 2 or 3 times more likely to be confirmed as legitimate spam blogs (true positives), compared to this time last year.

Here's a great investment idea. Everybody who needs money (which is most likely, everybody reading here) can invest $10 each. Everybody, reading this, can send me $10. Surely, each of you have a spare $10, to invest. What will I do with the funds received? I will, immediately, take 10% off the top. That's for my retirement account. I will let my friends (don't you wish that you were my friend?) take 5%, each, off the top. As I get investments from more blog owners, I'll send you - and the other initial investors - a token payment. At the end of a week, you, and the other investors, get to divide up the remainder. Isn't that a great investment idea?

We continue to see evidence of frustration about getting a blog indexed, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken . I can find the blog using the URL - but my visitor log shows nobody is reading the blog! and My blog was #1 for my title, in Google, 3 months ago! Last month, it dropped out of sight!! Why does Google let people hack their results??? People who report these problems do not understand that getting traffic to the blog involves more than simply getting the blog indexed , using the Author, Title, or URL of the blog.

OK, you now have a kick ass blog. Congrats. But nobody's looking at it. So what now? Now, you have work to do.